


Cartography

by eponymous_rose



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Canon - Audio, Canon - TV, Friendship, Gen, Humor, POV Third Person, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:20:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponymous_rose/pseuds/eponymous_rose





	Cartography

Hex, of course, was the first to find it.

He'd done rather a lot of poking around the TARDIS, once the initial weirdness had started to wear off, and to begin with he was mostly amazed at just how many shapeless and identical rooms a dimensionally transcendental timeship could contain. It was a bit disappointing, all told, to venture into impossibility and have it be an endless sequence of sterile white rooms.

It came as a bit of a shock, then, when Hex leaned against a wall and found it rather emphatically leaning back - the (extremely dignified) squeak he made as the wall swung open was enough to bring the Doctor and Ace running.

"Oh," said the Doctor, "I haven't seen this place in _years_."

And, just like that, he'd scurried in ahead of them, leaving Ace to roll her eyes as Hex babbled nervously about the ill-boding of walls that swung open to dark and ominous spaces beyond.

"It's what you were looking for, yeah?" she said, and patted him on the shoulder. "Bit of excitement'll do you good."

"Right," said Hex. "Because that's not the sort of statement that can backfire horribly at all."

He followed her in, though, because when it came right down to it, he'd much rather go into secret passages with Ace than remain in the well-lit portions of the TARDIS without her. What that said about him, apart from the fact that he occasionally suspected the timeship of planning his untimely demise, he hadn't quite managed to work out just yet.

"It's the map room!" the Doctor crowed from somewhere ahead of them, his voice echoing.

Inhaling sharply at the noise, Hex sneezed. "Bit dusty," Ace called ahead.

"Thought the TARDIS cleaned itself," Hex murmured, thinking of the socks he occasionally left on the floor as an experiment - he'd never managed to see exactly how it happened, but every time he took his eyes off them for a moment, they immediately reappeared, neatly folded, in his dresser drawer.

"Bit of a taste for the melodramatic," the Doctor said, with a hint of apology in his voice. "I've tried to have a talk with her about it, but I think it might be to do with the chameleon circuit."

"Airs and graces," Ace said, and they laughed.

"Look here," said the Doctor, and showed them a wall full of maps, cartographical and topographical and one that he insisted was biographical, in two and three and four dimensions (Hex's brain refused to make any sense of the five-dimensional map in the corner, which he imagined would make navigating a bit tricky at best).

"These are brilliant," said Ace, with a bit of a reverent tone in her voice that Hex wasn't at all sure he'd heard before. He decided it suited her, made her a bit less terrifying.

The Doctor was also regarding her with a curious expression, and Hex could nearly see the cogs and wheels of his mind processing the reaction, breaking the new information down into something more comprehensible. But it gave him a bit of a chill, thinking of the Doctor like that, so he turned and pretended to be quite involved in a set of maps denoting the yearly vegetation cycles of a small village on a planet with the unlikely name of Raxacoricofallapatorius.

"Tell you what," said Ace. "Maps are meant to be followed. And unless there's somewhere we're supposed to be-" Here she shot a telling look at the Doctor, who schooled his features into something approaching neutrality. "-we're free to go wherever, right?"

"Right," said the Doctor, and grinned. "See any map in particular you'd like to follow?"

"What say we each choose one?" said Ace. "Take turns, I mean."

"Brilliant idea, Ace!" The Doctor rubbed his hands together, squinting at the piles of tomes. "What say I take- yes, I think this one will do quite nicely. Now, I'll just pick a spot at random, then, and-"

Ace and Hex exchanged glances - that level of enthusiasm, coming from the Doctor, was never entirely genuine. "It's not that we don't trust you, Doctor," said Hex.

"Oh, not at all," said Ace, grinning.

The Doctor gave a theatrical sigh and, with a flick of his wrist, held up a blindfold. "Borrowed it from the firing squad who so kindly offered it to me," he said, tying it over his eyes with the exceedingly patient stance of the long-suffering. "You never know when these things might come in useful. There. Is that acceptable?"

"Looks fine," said Hex, when a poke from Ace reminded him that the Doctor wouldn't be able to see his nod.

"Where to, Professor?"

Spinning on his heel, and after only a couple of false starts, the Doctor jabbed his finger at a particular planet in a particular star system, located in the general vicinity of the seventy-fifth century.

Rather predictably, they ran into trouble - three unrelated alien invasions in the space of three hours, the first of which was repelled through diplomacy, the second of which was repelled through tact, and the last of which was repelled only when the Doctor realised that he'd picked up the leader's lost keys some centuries earlier, thus enabling her to return to her own planet without the need for invasion tactics.

"That," Hex announced to Ace, in the map-room once all the shooting had finished, "was more than mere coincidence."

"You're telling me," said Ace, and picked up the Doctor's discarded blindfold from where he'd left it on a stack of atlases. There were two pinprick holes cut in the fabric where the eyes would be. "He knew all along where we were going."

(They resolved to have a chat with him on the subject, but one thing led to another the way it so often did when the Doctor wanted to avoid conversation, and they never quite got around to it.)

It was decided that Hex should be the one to choose their next destination, and, with a strange sense of occasion, he produced a fluttering piece of paper that had been wedged between the pages of an old Earth atlas.

They crowded around to get a better look at it - it was a map, scrawled in a bold, childish hand, with an 'X' marked quite clearly in the center.

"Wouldn't have figured you for the type to go off hunting buried treasure," said Ace, as the Doctor consulted the TARDIS databases for clues as to the identity of the poorly rendered coastline.

"Yeah," said Hex, and shrugged, fighting down a blush. "Well. You know."

"Yeah," Ace said, and grinned. "I think I do."

They found it, with some trouble to do with land rights, grumpy housekeepers, and an alien who'd turned out to have lost his way en route to Pleebilum Seventeen and had grown rather fond of the quiet Terran life.

A small box for a treasure, and inside was an assortment of toy soldiers, long-stale bubble gum, a whistle, and three handwritten notes. They were, as it turned out, each from a child who'd dug the treasure up in the past, found the note of welcome from the previous young pirate, and reburied it with his or her own treasure. Hex, smiling, added a sprinkle of alien coins when the Doctor wasn't looking, and a note about travelling among the stars. He deposited the rolled-up map in a passing boy's bag as they made their way back to the TARDIS, and knew he was smiling stupidly with the sensation of having engineered events to make someone truly happy.

"You're a bit of a softie, aren't you?" said Ace, laughing.

"Right," said Hex. "Male nurse. Never heard that one before."

It fell to Ace, then, to determine their final destination. She hesitated for quite a long time - he hadn't expected that of her - and finally she picked up an old, musty tome, opened it, and handed it to him.

The grin he'd been half-heartedly concealing broadened.

"That's perfect," he said, and handed her back the book. The Doctor was flipping idly through a small leaflet about summers at Blackpool, feigning indifference, but he perked up quickly when Ace handed the book over to him.

"It is," he said, and laughed, tapping Ace on the nose with his brolly. "Quite perfect! Come on, Ace, Hex. The universe isn't going to explore itself!"

They dashed out of the room with rather more haste than a time machine should by any right engender, leaving piles of musty, dusty books and multidimensional coordinate systems in their wake.

Lying open on the desk where Ace had dropped it, the old atlas showed a curiously empty page, with a single inscription in the centre.

_Here Be Dragons_


End file.
